Author Charlie Savage

In June, Jihad Diyab (also spelled Dhiab), an erratic former Guantanamo Bay detainee from Syria who was resettled in Uruguay (and who is also the plaintiff in a continuing lawsuit seeking to make public videotapes of forcefeeding sessions), said he was going to be incommunicado for the month of Ramadan. Then authorities lost track of him. This

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has disclosed another batch of internal shooting incident review reports in response to my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the New York Times (pursued by the NYT’s lawyer David McCraw and the annual NYT First Amendment fellows, currently Tali Leinwand). The names of the people who were shot are redacted unless

When you write a book–missing a lot of time with your family and flirting with walking away from a job you love in order to get it done–it is sincerely gratifying to see it find an audience. The first wave of that, of course, is reviews. The flurry for Power Wars are subsiding, although Barron’s published a nice review earlier this month by the FIU

With the help of the New York Times‘ legal guru, David McCraw, I have been using a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to assemble a massive public library of internal Federal Bureau of Investigation shooting incident reports dating back to 1993. We’ve just updated that library with about 700 pages of such reports

Several prominent law professors who were formerly members of the Obama national security legal team are debating the “dissent memo” signed by 51 mid-level career State Department diplomats about the administration’s current policy toward Syria. The diplomats think the United States should carry out airstrikes against the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad, not just

UPDATE: FBI/DOJ reverses course, releases uncensored version of 1st Orlando shooter 911 call (what about the others?) pic.twitter.com/WudWiLR9V3 — Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) June 20, 2016 The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released a partially censored transcript of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s 911 call in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and

C-Span has now made available the video of last weekend’s panel discussion on executive power at the American Constitutional Society for Law and Policy annual convention, which I moderated. The all-star panel included Walter Dellinger, Marty Lederman, Sai Prakash, Neomi Rao, and Hina Shamsi. Here is the description from ACS: The Imperial Presidency? President George W. Bush

The text of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s version of the 2017 intelligence authorization bill has finally been made public. The panel is chaired by Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina. The bill has been getting some attention because, as first reported by Jenna McLaughlin of The Intercept, it has a provision that would expand (or, depending

This doesn’t have anything directly to do with national security (or does it?), but this is such a marker of the incoherence of the 2016 presidential race that I can’t resist sharing it. A friend just passed on the below e-mail, which the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out today to the mailing list of “Romney for President, Inc.”

Power Wars provides “a master class in how to think seriously about crucial aspects of the [war on terrorism]. … comprehensive, authoritative … essential and enthralling.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Already classic…there is no other work quite like it.”

—The Jerusalem Post

Power Wars explores “in intricate detail nearly every major issue in Obama’s national security policy: detainees, military commissions, torture, surveillance, secrecy, targeted killings, and war powers. Its behind-the-scenes story will likely stand as the definitive record of Obama’s approach to law and national security.”